Atomic Patent

In 1935 a group of Italian scientists led by Enrico Fermi applied for a U.S. patent on a process that looked, at the time, about as impractical as a bridge of butterflies' wings. While working together in Rome, they had discovered that neutrons (themselves discovered in 1932) could be slowed down by passage through water or paraffin. Thus slowed, the neutrons were much more likely to be captured by other elements, making them radioactive. A friend of the scientists, Gabriel M. Giannini,* thought the process might have commercial value, but practically no one else did. Such great U.S. companies as Du Pont, General Electric and American Cyanamid showed no interest at all.

By the start of World War II, four of the five scientists who applied for the patent had escaped from Mussolini's Italy and come to the U.S. Soon both they and their patent vanished underground. The slow neutron process was the basis of the early nuclear reactors; without it, there could have been no plutonium. Enrico Fermi saw his neutrons fire up the first reactor at Chicago in 1942.

But the patent, No. 2,206,634, was lost in the legal confusion that surrounds everything atomic. It did not pay off until last week, when the Atomic Energy Commission, after much hesitation, awarded $300,000 to the Italians and their associates. Besides Fermi, two of them, Drs. Franco Rasetti and Emilio Segre, are now atomic scientists in the U.S. The fourth, Dr. Edoardo Amaldi, is still in Rome. The fifth, Dr. Bruno Pontecorvo, will have trouble collecting his. He vanished in Finland in 1950 and is now presumably working for the Russians.

* No kin to the U.S. banking family, he now heads a thriving guided-missile and instrument company in Pasadena, Calif.

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